I’m starving. I’m writing this on the train home from a private showing at the Victoria and Albert, and the post-exhibition nibbles were almost all meat or salmon. There was a dodgy spinach roll thing, which was full of raw leaves that stuck in your teeth, and some little cheese scones with cream cheese and olive, but that was it.

The pictures were hit and miss. Some fantastic photos of people, but some otherwise rather dodgy shots of the sides of buildings, which looked like the frames you shoot when you’ve just put a new film in your camera and you’re winding it on. Looking at the little captions, though, I finally understood what makes good photography. Composition, colour, light and dark all play their part, but far more important is the story, or more precisely the backstory.

They had a whole contact sheet of variations on that famous picture of Christine Keeler. She was sitting backwards on a wooden chair just after the whole Profumo affair had been big headline news. They even had the real chair there, too, along with big unfriendly signs forbidding you from touching it.

Now, in itself the Keeler picture is very good. The lighting is perfect, the pose is imaginative, and it had been immitated a thousand times since. What makes it important, though, is the story - the fact that she was involved with both the minister for war and a Russian diplomat and, as such, some considered national security to be at risk. It is only the backstory, though, that makes it great.

It goes something like this… The pictures were originally taken to promote a big new film, which never actually made it to a big new screen. When the usual humdrum clothed pics were done, the publisher of the magazine in which they were to be printed insisted that they do some without any clothes. Keeler refused, but the publisher insisted that it was part of the contract.

So, sensitive to her needs, the photographer, a guy called Lewis Morley, ordered everyone except himself and Keeler out of the room, then turned his back and asked her to undress and sit back to front on a Jacobsen chair. In itself, this chair, the Ant chair, was already hot a fashion item, but it was soon to become almost as famous as the woman whose dignity it preserved.

In this way, Keeler fulfilled her contract. She was naked, after all. At the same time, though, she retained her dignity, and the world benefitted from one of the most memorable and remarkable photos of all time, made moreso for the accompanying backstory that so few know.

The Sun came up trumps today with Blood lust of killer sheep - a classic piece of reporting that includes the phrase:

But bird expert Dr Niall Burton watched in horror as one bloodthirsty woolly fiend pounced on a baby grouse and munched it. Eerily, the attack came three miles from the spot where a flock of sheep pushed a woman to her death off a cliff … Farmer

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